Chapter 3. Tech Lead

I became a tech lead many years ago. I had been promoted to senior engineer, and was working on a small team with several other senior engineers. It was kind of a surprise that I was promoted to tech lead, because I wasn’t the most senior person on the team by either title or years of experience. In retrospect, I had a few advantages. For one, I was more than just a good engineer. I was a good communicator. I could write clear documents, I could give presentations without melting down, and I could talk to people in different teams and different roles and explain what was going on. I was also good at prioritizing. I was eager to push work forward and decide what needed to be done next. Finally, I was willing to pick up the pieces and do what needed to be done to make progress. I think, in the end, this pragmatic urgency was the deciding factor. The tech lead role, after all, is a leadership position, even when it’s not a management position.

I’ve also seen tech leads flounder. One particularly memorable struggle was a person who was an amazing engineer, wrote great code, but hated talking to people and often got distracted by technical details. I watched him go down rabbit hole after rabbit hole, and in the meantime, the product manager took advantage of his absence to railroad the rest of the team into committing to feature delivery that was both poorly designed and way too aggressive. The project was a mess, and what did the tech lead do? He went chasing after the next refactoring, because he was sure that the problems were entirely in the way the code was structured. You probably recognize that story, because it happens everywhere. The idea that the tech lead role should automatically be given to the most experienced engineer, the one who can handle the most complex features or who writes the best code, is a common misconception that even experienced managers fall for. Tech lead is not the job for the person who wants the freedom to focus deeply on the details of her own code. A tech lead who does this is not doing her job. But what is the job of tech lead, really? What do we expect from this person?

As with many titles in software engineering, “tech lead” lacks a common definition. The best I can do is draw from my own experience and the experience of others. My job as tech lead was to continue to write code, but with the added responsibilities of representing the group to management, vetting our plans for feature delivery, and dealing with a lot of the details of the project management process. I could be the tech lead, despite not being the most senior person, because I was willing and able to take on the responsibilities of the role, while the rest of my team were more interested in staying purely focused on the software they were writing. When my team at Rent the Runway created our engineering career ladder, we consciously chose to define the role of tech lead as a set of characteristics an engineer could take on at many points on the ladder, rather than a specific level. We took this tack because we wanted to recognize that, as teams change and evolve, the tech lead role may be held by many different stages of engineer, and may be passed from one engineer to another without either person necessarily changing his functional job level. The tech lead may not have exactly the same role from company to company, or even from team to team within a company, but we know from the title that it is expected to be both a technical position and a leadership role, and that it is often a temporary set of responsibilities rather than a permanent title. So, with all that said: what is a tech lead? Here is the description we created at Rent the Runway:

The tech lead role is not a point on the ladder, but a set of responsibilities that any engineer may take on once they reach the senior level. This role may or may not include people management, but if it does, the tech lead is expected to manage these team members to the high management standards of RTR tech. These standards include:

Regular (weekly) 1-1 touchbases

Regular feedback on career growth, progression towards goals, areas for improvement, and praise as warranted

Working with reports to identify areas for learning and helping them grow in these areas via project work, external learning, or additional mentoring

If a tech lead is not managing directly, they are still expected to provide mentorship and guidance to the other members of the team.

The tech lead is learning how to be a strong technical project manager, and as such, they are scaling themselves by delegating work effectively without micromanaging. They focus on the whole team’s productivity and strive to increase the impact of the team’s work product. They are empowered to make independent decisions for the team and are learning how to handle difficult management and leadership situations. They are also learning how to partner effectively with product, analytics, and other areas of the business.

It is not required that an engineer work as a tech lead to progress, but it is the most common way for engineers to grow from senior engineer 1 -> 2 and is required to grow from senior engineer 2 to engineering lead. Realistically it is very hard to grow past senior engineer 2 without ever having acted as a tech lead, even on the individual contributor track, due to the importance at senior levels of leadership and responsibility.

Perhaps a better shorthand for this is the description used by Patrick Kua in his book, Talking with Tech Leads:

A leader, responsible for a (software) development team, who spends at least 30 percent of their time writing code with the team.

Tech leads are in the position to act as strong technical project leaders, and to use their expertise at a larger scale so that their whole team gets better. They can make independent decisions, and they play a big role in coordinating with other nonengineering partners that their team might have. You’ll note that there’s nothing here about specifically technical work. This is a senior engineering role, but it’s a mistake to tie the notion of tech lead to one that boils down to the best or most experienced engineer on the team. You can’t lead without engaging other people, and people skills are what we’re asking the new tech lead to stretch, much more than pure technical expertise. However, tech leads will be working on one major new technical skill: project management. The work of breaking down a project has a lot of similarity to the work of designing systems, and learning this skill is valuable even for engineers who don’t want to manage people.

If you’ve found yourself in the tech lead position, congratulations! Someone thinks you have what it takes to be the point person for a team. Now it’s time to learn some new skills!

Being a Tech Lead

Being a tech lead is an exercise in influencing without authority. As the tech lead I am leading a team, but we all report to the same engineering manager. So not only do I have to influence my peers, but I also have to influence up to my manager to ensure we are prioritizing the right work. In a recent role this was particularly challenging because one of the first projects I tackled after becoming the tech lead was to stop all feature development and focus on technical debt. It was clear to me that the “technical debt can” had been kicked down the road for far too long; deploying new code was difficult, operating the existing services was expensive, and the on-call rotation was hellish. I believed that we needed to go slow in order to go fast in the future. However, this was not an easy sell to the other developers, who wanted to write fun new features, or to my manager, who had a constant stream of requests from our customers. I sold the idea by focusing on the different impact this would have on individual team members. For some team members it was about having a more reliable service, for others it was about iteration speed, and for others it was about reducing the on-call burden so that they could sleep through the night. When talking with my manager I emphasized the reduced operational overhead, which meant we could accomplish more feature work as a team in the future.

Becoming a tech lead required me to change my focus. Work is now less about me and working on the most technically challenging idea or the most fun project; instead, my focus is more on my team. How do I empower them? How do I remove the obstacles slowing them down? Working on a rewrite, or some new exciting feature that helped me express the full extent of my technical prowess, might have been more fun, but what the team needed at the time was to tackle technical debt and to focus on operations. In the end the initiative was incredibly successful. The team reduced the number of critical paging alerts by 50%, and in the following quarter we almost doubled the number of deploys we were able to do.

Caitie McCaffrey